


Day 31. Breakable

by Munnin



Series: Fictober [31]
Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Canto Bight
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-30
Updated: 2018-10-30
Packaged: 2019-08-10 01:35:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 953
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16460924
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Munnin/pseuds/Munnin
Summary: Back on Canto Bight, set a month after Slice (And nearly sixty years after the rest of our story.)





	Day 31. Breakable

Eleven people were killed in what the holo-news-casts dubbed _The Fathier Riots_ , scores more were injured. 

Some of the dead were identified – by friends, by lovers, and in one terrible case, by a grieving father. 

But most were never given names. 

It wasn’t a great surprise. Canto Bight was a place you could be anyone you wanted to be – leaving behind the baggage of your old life. Some for a few days to party without consequence, some to make a new start.

It didn’t help that the bodies had been looted long before the authorities arrived to collect the remains. 

Little was left to put names to the shattered forms. 

Without identities or next of kin to pay for burial, the bodies were taken to a canyon in the desert to be dumped. The mass grave known to the locals as the Debtor’s Mausoleum.

And that would have been an end to it. The streets were cleaned, the broken walls and windows replaced. The stable owners were fined for only having slave children as security but it was a token effort to find someone to blame. 

Other than the escaped criminals who had started the riot. 

Nari wouldn’t have thought anything more of it, if it hadn’t been for the files. 

Two music files, unencrypted and unsigned, appeared on one of the holo-chat boards she followed. One used by transient musicians to keep in touch. 

The first was an epitaphian tone poem. Not by any measure the most beautiful she’d ever heard, but lovely and proud. This being, whoever they had been, faced death with eyes open and head held high. 

The second was transcendent. 

It echoed the structure of a tone poem but longer, richer. A symphony. Where a tone poem was the artist’s final words, the second piece was a saga; a life told in melodies and movements. 

And it had been written over a lifetime, a long one at that. Nari could hear the eras unfold in each act, motifs repeating and building, growing with experience and time. 

Jubilation and loss, triumph and tribulation. Times of boom and bust.

A history of the galaxy through one being’s eyes. A life lived well, but always a little distanced, held just out of arm’s reach. 

She knew the artist at once. 

And if she could have wept, her tears would have drowned the streets of Canto Bight and made the city into a new sea.

She called everyone she knew, called in every favour she had and then a few. 

Word spread and others came. Slicers and musicians, rogues and rebels. They offered their help without needing to be asked. 

They took a hover-sled into Debtor’s Mausoleum, faces and respiratory apertures covered against the decay and corruption of the mass grave. 

His slender body was shattered, long hollow bones snapped and mangled. Wrapping the broken body in a shroud, the friends he never knew he had carried Swan Le’s body home.

The message went out, passed from hand to hand, from ear to ear. Those who had looted his broken body turned up in alleyways, bruised and bloody till his things were returned to him.

His songsteel flute was crushed and unplayable. Not that any other musician would. Some things just weren’t done. They found his flat cap on an urchin child, the inner band still stained with his blood. 

They buried him with honour, marking the place with pillar of Jelucani fogstone, his symphony transcribed onto its crystalline surface to be played by the sun and the breeze. 

Madam Fu’s was the only place right for a wake and for once, the drinks weren’t watered down. From sunset to dawn and to sunset again, they played and talked and traded stories about Swan Le.

Swan Le, always so precise and fussy, so quick to blush and fluster. Swan who wrote code like no-one else in the galaxy, complex and elegant. Swan who couldn’t play to a crowd to save himself and yet could bend every ear in a room to his song. 

Swan who never let anyone in. Who never knew how much people admired and respected him. Who never knew how he would be missed. 

Swan who remained a mystery to his dying day. Beautiful and distant and strange. 

Nari’s Zabrak partner waited outside the club, looking impatient. He was becoming more of a hinderance than a help and Nari was ready to cut him loose and move on. But there was one last thing he could be useful for. 

“Did you get it?” she asked, slinging her double jocimer onto her back. 

He nodded, kicking stones along the street as they walked. 

“Well?” She demanded and he produced a compact deck no bigger than her forearm, a wrist cuff data pad with a broken screen. 

“It’s broken,” he huffed petulantly. “Not worth how much of our score I had to pay for it.”

“Darling, you’re an idiot.” She hugged the deck to her chest. “This might be the most precious collection of code in the galaxy. I just hope he’ll forgive me for using it.” Her answer would come when she sat down to slice it. If she could breach his encryption and access his codes, she would have proven herself worthy to use them.

“If you say so.”

It took her years to crack it, coming back every year to sit at the base of Swan’s grave and play his symphony. 

Others came back too, meeting up at Madam Fu’s to play snatches and fragments of their own compositions. 

It was a style of music that became famous on Canto Bight, and that Canto Bight became famous for. Biographical concertos that came to be known as Swan Songs.

**Author's Note:**

> This is the final story, thank you for sticking with me! I'd love your thoughts and feedback so please, hit me up with comments.
> 
> Massive thanks to Josh, Drew, Jess, and everyone still reading.


End file.
